The story began in April 1901, when the Russian Empire's education ministry announced a new industrial technical school for Mykolaiv, which opened its doors on 1 July 1902. From the start it aimed high: after three years of study, graduates earned the qualification of engineer. Over the following decades the school reorganized and grew, lengthening its courses, adding laboratories for metallurgy, chemistry, and thermodynamics, and merging with other institutions until it became the Mykolaiv Shipbuilding Institute in 1930. Recognition followed. In 1970 it received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and in 1994 it gained full university status. A decade later, in 2004, President Leonid Kuchma granted it national standing and its present name, honoring Admiral Makarov.

Today the institution is a sprawling enterprise with eight institutes, several faculties, even a school at sea, and a student body of around twelve thousand studying across dozens of specialties. Since 1941 it has trained over seventeen hundred marine engineers and, all told, tens of thousands of skilled workers. Its faculty of doctorate holders and scientists works on the real problems of modern shipbuilding, new hull design, safety at sea, unmanned underwater craft, welding and marine metallurgy, and cleaner marine power. The university has become a recognized center for training marine welders in particular, preparing specialists whose qualifications match European standards, a reminder that behind every vessel launched at Mykolaiv stands a chain of careful, technical education.

A university is also its people, and this one has produced some remarkable ones, including Olga Kharlan, a four-time world champion in women's sabre fencing, and the chess grandmaster Li Min Peng. But the institution's recent history has also been marked by violence. On 10 October 2022, during the Battle of Mykolaiv, the university's building was partially ruined by Russian missile strikes, one of several attacks on the city's places of learning. That a school devoted to engineering and the sea should find itself on the front line is its own kind of tragedy, and yet the university, like the city around it, has kept teaching, determined that the long tradition of Mykolaiv shipbuilding should have engineers to carry it forward.